Does Seeing the Doctor More Often Keep You Out of the Hospital?
By exploiting a unique health insurance benefit design, we provide novel evidence on the causal association between outpatient and inpatient care. Our results indicate that greater outpatient spending was associated with more hospital admissions: a $100 increase in outpatient spending was associated with a 2.7% increase in the probability of having an inpatient event and a 4.6% increase in inpatient spending among enrollees in our sample. Moreover, we present evidence that the increase in hospital admissions associated with greater outpatient spending was for conditions in which it is plausible to argue that the physician and patient could exercise discretion.
HT: Michael Ramlet.
In so many ways, it is uncanny how similar health care is to other markets……as dysfunctional as our health care system is.
This may or may not hold true across all areas of medicine.
I can see how seeing the doctor more leads to more inpatient spending. Primary care doctors will find things wrong with people during routine visits and recommend going into inpatient care to address the situation.
That’s exactly what I was thinking @Steve.
I agree, but Otis is right.. It’s a business, and increasing outpatient care = increasing demand. People tend to agree to redundant procedures when it’s not coming out of their own pocket. What’s the welfare economics addage? As beneficiaries of public goods we want more, but as taxpayers we want less?
@Kyle: Isn’t that how most things in life work? We increasingly want more for less. I also agree that healthcare is a business – and it should be treated as such without insane amount of government regulation hampering the supply/demand equation that would ultimately bring down prices (hence more for less).
Visits to doctors rarely stay at 1 or 2 visits. More often than not they ask you to come back for one reason or another, and what at first you thought were basic cold symptoms became an extensive check up for every single condition known by mankind.
Seeing a doctor does make you go back more often than if you hand’t visited him in the first place, thus increasing inpatient care. No doubt.